With the usage of advanced features in the latest personal devices (e.g., cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) pagers, and the like) the creation and consumption of digital content has become part of many individuals' everyday life. This includes taking digital photos, listening to digital music, watching short videos, and more. Apart from self-creation and self-consumption, the concept of content sharing is stronger than ever. People want to be able to share their content on many different levels with others including, for example, their family, friends and colleagues.
One problem arises, however, from the fact that there are many different protocols or services that can be used for exchanging content, and each protocol or service may be ideal for certain situations, but not for others. Examples of such services include E-mail, which is mostly used for person-to-person communication, is targeted to devices connected to the Internet, and requires certain infrastructure (e.g., E-mail servers, etc.); Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), which is used in the mobile domain and is targeted for exchanging small media files; and Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)/Audio Video (AV), which is targeted to device-to-device communications and, while it supports large files, is targeted mainly for personal devices, wherein the sending and receiving devices are typically owned by the same person.
Other examples of services or protocols used for exchanging content include Atom, an XML-based syndication format that is mainly used for uploading content to weblogs; Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV), which is an enhancement to the HTTP protocol that enables documents to be written via HTTP, is mainly used in the enterprise domain, supports large files, and requires numerous settings; Peer-to-Peer networks, which are used for public user-to-user exchange of large files; and Bluetooth Object Exchange (OBEX), which is targeted to device-to-device content exchange where devices are in proximity of one another.
Because the majority of devices, both fixed and mobile, support many of these services and protocols, it is up to the user desiring to transmit or share his or her content with other individuals to select the appropriate one for each particular instance (i.e., depending upon, for example, what content he or she is transmitting and/or where, in relation to his or her device, the intended recipient is located).
In addition to the numerous available services and protocols, there are also numerous connectivity bearers that may be used, wherein, like the services and protocols, each may be best for a specific instance. Examples of such connectivity bearers include Cellular Packet Radio, used for mobile devices; Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) Infrastructure, used both in fixed and mobile devices typically for Internet connectivity; WLAN Ad-hoc, which is used primarily in mobile devices for proximity services (e.g., mobile-to-mobile connectivity); Bluetooth, which, like WLAN Ad-hoc, is typically used in mobile devices for proximity services; and the fixed Internet, which is used by static devices for Internet connectivity.
A user may, likewise, be required to determine and specify which connectivity bearer should be used depending upon, among other things, the content he or she is sharing and, as above, where his or her device is located with respect to the intended recipient.
To make things even more complicated, many individuals have more than one device (e.g., a cellular telephone, PDA, pager, home media center or content server, personal computer (PC), laptop, etc.), wherein each device may have a different range of connectivity (e.g., short or wide) and different capabilities for handing different types and sizes of content. For example, while a PC may support E-mail, UPnP/AV, Peer-to-Peer, and the like, an individual's cellular telephone may support Bluetooth, MMS and E-mail.
In order to share content, a user may be required to determine, among other things, which service or protocol to use, which connectivity bearer to use, and to which device associated with an intended recipient to transmit the content. In order to make these determinations, the user may be required to determine, for example, whether the sending and the receiving devices support the same protocols, whether the receiving device is in proximity and, if not, whether it can be reached using an alternative method, whether the receiving device can handle (render) the specific content type or the size of the shared file (i.e., does the receiving device have the requisite memory space), or how will the sending and receiving devices exchange settings (e.g., MAC/IP addresses, usernames, passwords, security keys, directory paths, etc.).
In addition to the foregoing, in many instances users are able to invite other individuals to remotely access content stored on the user's home PC or server, or even his or her mobile device. While beneficial, this too may cause even further issues in terms of how the invitees will know how or where to access the content, particularly if the user moves the content from one device (e.g., his or her mobile device) to another (e.g., his or her media server).
A need, therefore, exists for an easier way to share content with others that does not require a user to make difficult determinations in terms of how and to where to transmit the content.